Cyberhetoric

Tracing & Erasing in Meedia Res

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Occupy Austin and the Idle Talk of ‘the they’

In relation to the ongoing
Occupation movements I’ve been split in terms of whether I have hope in them,
identify with them or simply let sputter out unnoticed. Initially I thought
they were rather novel and if they gained enough inertia they could potentially
lead to mass strikes that could reinvigorate organized labor. But as I began to
look into the demography of the movements, the landscape appears to be
characterized more by trustafarians playing hacky sack and drinking
micro-brews. Even the recent campus movements that chant “we’re the 99%” seem
somewhat ridiculous to me. Yes you are the 99% but most likely if you’re
attending this university you’re the top 10% of the country, and top 1% of the
world.

In a lot of ways, the
movement has been somewhat self-aggrandizing in many senses. I understand it is
decentralized and leaderless, and thus is may be wrong to make sweeping
generalizations, nonetheless I think writ large what is being produced will end
up remaining unorganized and position-less. It comes off as an outburst of
populism, not a tangible political force. I think the result is that either
politicians will pander to and co-opt them, and van Jones has already attempted
to do just that, or the movement will refuse the influence and they will drift
into obscurity. Transforming a moment of potentiality into a nullity.

There are those that
proffer broad based class critique, [and I say critique instead of ‘warfare’
because this is nothing like ‘warfare,’ just watch the Brooklyn balloon
resistance] but its typically aimed at scapegoating ceo’s rather than the
totality. Then there are those that criticize ‘the system’ yet the response
they seek to garner is simply a reinstatement of the unemployed. More taxes,
less bread!

In
my previous post I indicated that I would not be reducing my analysis to class
critique and that I would engage in a more phenomenological approach. In Sein und Zeit in The everyday being of the “there,” and the Falling of Dasein section
Heidegger writes

Our
interpretation is purely ontological in its aims, and is far removed from any
moralizing critique of everyday Dasein, and from the aspirations of a
‘philosophy of culture’ (SuZ, 210).

Likewise, my
interpretation of these movements does not come as a distanced recluse rather I
went and observed the movements first hand the last couple of days. I may be
somewhat more moralistic than Heidegger in tenor, but will attempt to use the
phenomenological analysis as a jumping off point for questioning the effects,
modes, and genuineness of the movements as a thing in and of themselves.

Yesterday when I went to
the pre-rally on the main mall of the University of Texas at Austin I spoke
with Professor Miller (I hate sharing my last name with this guy) of the
McCombs Business School. He was talking to some of the protesters and a
journalist from the Daily Texan. After pontificating about the ills of
government regulation his basic point was that ‘these kids’ need to quit
‘complaining’ and start coming up with incentive based solutions to the market.
One of the things that sparked this post however was a comment he made that
these protests simply get people to join on board something without
understanding the ‘back story’ of the situation. Basically that the protests
make people unreflectively bandwagon onto a movement they are ignorant about.

At the time I quickly
retorted that symbolic protests are not public policy forums and that his
argument was generally more characteristic of the right than the left, and that
this is simply a response to the rhetorical branding that’s worked so well
since the Gingrich revolution. On further reflection after watching the
protests evolve in person and online, and seeing the media’s coverage of the
movements it seems he might have had a decent point after all.

Heidegger produces the
idea of Idle Talk as a mode of
Dasein’s average everydayness. It’s not that Idle Talk is more or less present-at-hand as a mode of discourse
than others, it points to the ways that this mode can only come from the sort
of Being that has disclosedness as a necessary and essential aspect of its
existence. Heidegger’s definition,

The Being-said, the dictum, the pronouncement
[Ausspruch]-all these now stand surety for the genuineness of the discourse and
of the understanding which belongs to it, and for its appropriateness to the
facts. And because this discoursing has lost its primary relationship-of-Being
towards the entity talked about, or else has never achieved such a relationship,
it does not communicate in such a way as to let this entity be appropriated in
a primordial manner, but communicates rather by following the route of gossiping and passing the word along. What is said-in-the-talk as such, spreads
in wider circles and takes on an authoritative characters. Things are so
because one says so. Idle talk is constituted by just such gossiping and
passing the word along- a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand
on becomes aggravated to complete groundlessness (SuZ, 212, emphasis original).

Idle
talk is a people magazine, shooting the breeze, speaking without ground. What’s
interesting here is not just a basic description of people talking without
either being sincere or having acquired a level of expertise to do so but
rather the analysis of the ways in which IdleTalk lends itself to circulation. Idle Talk as a mode of communication is
more apt to circulate because its very nature implies that lack of ontological
questioning; things can simply be taken on face. This precludes a search for
the grounds upon which the discourse is spoken from, it is a part of the larger
forces of nihilism in which the Being of beings that speaks is forgotten. The type of entities that
language possesses is likewise forgotten,concealed, and covered over. Heidegger
writes;

The groundlessness of idle
talk is no obstacle to its becoming public; instead it encourages this. Idle
talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making
the thing one’s own. If this were done, idle talk would founder; and it already
guards against such a danger. Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up;
it not only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but develops
an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off
any longer (SuZ, 213).

Idle Talk circulates throughout the public because of its
simple reductive ‘truth’ value. Things don’t have truth for a specific Being as
the result of making it their own through ontological reflection, rather things
are because ‘they’ have said so. The desire for understanding pure and simple
obscures the necessity for inquiry,

The average understanding of
the reader will never be able to
decide what has been drawn from primordial sources with a struggle and how much
is just gossip. The average understanding, moreover, will not want any such
distinction, and does not need it, because, of course, it understands
everything (SuZ, 212, emphasis original).

This
is what upsets me about the Occupation movements. Its not that I want to see
these people engaged in riveting dialectical materialist analyses that would
rival Marx or Harvey today, but I think the lack of anything resembling a
coherent message points to the fact that the movement embraces an anything goes
sort of mentality. Everyone’s sign is just fine. There aren’t any internal
tensions being exposed. I understand the left has been plagued by in-fighting
for far too long and a generous disposition of alliance is strategic, but to
what end? Its probably more strategic to create some sort of signifying point
at which the criticism crystallizes. I understand it’s a movement against Wall
Street, but does capitalism really have a center? It will always be more
dispersed and decentralized than your movement, how successful can mimicry be?

Heidegger
puts it best,

Thus, by its very nature,
idle talk is a closing-off, since to go back to the ground of what is talked
about is something which it leaves undone….Because
of this, idle talk discourages any new inquiry and any disputation, and in a
peculiar way suppresses them and holds them back (SuZ, 213)

Idle
talk as a modality of communication cuts off and closes down. It seeks to
shelter being from agonistic engagement. For movements to be successful they
need to be more aggressive and explicity. This movement is nothing like the Battle
for Seattle or the Arab Spring. There is no attempt to disrupt the flow of
goods, traffic, or people. Simple chanting and cheering may ‘speak truth to
power’ but it won’t redirect the power relationships.

The dominance of the public
way in which things have been interpreted has already been decisive even for
the possibilities of having a mood-that is, for the basic way in which Dasein
lets the world “matter” to it. The “they” prescribes on’s state-of-mind, and
determines what and how one ‘sees’ (SuZ, 213).

Thus
my critique is not aimed at tweaking or reforming a bit of the content within
the movement writ large, but rather to expose the ways that the general
disposition of the movement in terms of the way it inculcates a mood of
critique and movement is problematic. It enframes the complex flows of global
capitalism and the populist energy of America into neat easily understood and
thus subverted forces. This obscures the contradictions of capital rather than
searching for breaking points. It assumes single individuals are evil, rather
than attempting to smash the oppressor within. It views capital as a
disembodied structure rather than one that operates moreso on the ability to
reproduce the relations of production by commodifying the sensorium, our
musculature, emotive tendencies and perceptual capacities.

When Dasein maintains itself
in idle talk, it is – as Being-in-the-world – cut off from its primary and
primordially genuine relationships-of-Being towards the world, towards
Dasein-with, and towards its very Being-in. Such a Dasein keeps floating
unattached [in einer Schwebe]; yet in so doing, it is always alongside the
world, with Others, and towards itself (SuZ 214).

This
general mood cuts off our capacities to care for the Other’s we are speaking
about and for more generally. The desire for completely intelligible system of
capitalism and the arrogance it breeds cultivates a general cynicism that fails
to see the objectifying processes within the everyday. Capital does not exist
solely as an invisible structure that occurs behind the closed doors of the New
York Stock Exchange its refracted through our movements, modes of speaking, and
friend and family interactions. Until greater attention is paid to the minutiae
of everyday biopolitical processes, than the reversal of such power relations
will always remain a utopian, moralistic castle in the sky.

While the particular Dasein
drifts along towards an ever-increasing groundlessness as it floats, the
uncanniness of this floating remains hidden from it under their protecting
shelter (SuZ, 214)

Back in Business

My blog has sat idly by for the past couple months. But to your delight it's back up and running. The next series of posts will focus on a set of seemingly disparate events or phenomena but hopefully the connections holding them together will become clear.

In general my theoretical disposition will center not solely on Marxist Ideological critique as it has in the past. Rather, I will attempt to return to 'the things themselves' and incorporate a more phenomenological framework for analyzing cultural events, texts and relations. I'm currently in the midst of reading Heidegger's Sein und Zeit and some of his lecture courses, this will largely be my jumping off point.

In terms of content, I hope to incorporate works from the newly emergent field of Critical Disability Studies in order to map out the traces of ableism and its necessary resistant supplement, as well as the role of new media in culture in general.